Damian Howard’s article (“Why Benedict was right”, 14 February) prompts the question, raised earlier by reading Benedict’s Regensburg lecture, whether Western culture has too tight a hold on the spread of the Gospel. When Fr Howard writes of “the providential fusion of Greek philosophy and biblical religion that is Catholic/Orthodox Christianity”, I wonder whether it is sufficiently catholic, in the sense of pertaining to the whole. If his great Jesuit forebear Matteo Ricci, the seventeenth-century missionary to China, had been allowed to develop his work of rooting the Gospel in Chinese culture, would he have thought it necessary for sophisticated converts, well versed in their indigenous philosophy, to adopt that of Plato and Aristotle in order to be